Ranking All 22 Major Summer 2016 Blockbusters From Worst To Best

It's been a strange summer for blockbusters, over-shadowed at various points by the long brewing war between the critics and "real people", as studios drive a wedge in to discredit poor review scores. That furore has actually distracted from the fact that it's not been a great summer for film fans.

Even the traditional popcorn films have lacked their usual appeal with some of the year's most likely financial busts coming in a season that actually promised a lot initially. Thank God for the rare exceptions, though, as they fight the losing battle to convince everyone that "blockbuster" doesn't automatically have to mean critically bad.

When we eventually pick through the rubble, they will be the sparse bright points, and they deserve further praise for bucking the trend. But which deserves top billing this year?

First a little clarification: a blockbuster in this case has to either have scored a major box office amount (let's say over $150m) or had an eye-wateringly high budget (in most cases the $100m mark denotes fairly safe blockbuster territory. And of course, some films here don't necessarily have to have both...

Incidentally, you'll not find Batman v Superman here, obviously, because it didn't come out in the summer, no matter how Hollywood tries to redefine the window!

How do the biggest blockbusters of the Summer 2016 window rank?

Here's a stunning revelation for some of you out there: just because a film is old, does not mean it is suddenly somehow bad. The passage of time does not rob classics like Ben-Hur of their lustre. Nor does it mean anyone should be compelled to spunk $100m unnecessarily remaking them (with a self-protecting, cowardly "reinvention" tag slapped on at the last minute).

The new Ben-Hur's awfulness is just as inevitable as you'd suspect, and fatally, even the production values are p*ss-poor, with terrible, giddy editing and sloppy CGI work. Even the chariot race - the one thing they should have got right - was mediocre.

One of the chief problems lay in casting Jack Huston, whose Ben-Hur is simply not interesting: he has neither the charisma nor the gravitas to pull off the role and he's invariably outdone by Toby Kebbell's villain. The latter, incidentally, needs to fire his agent.

Imagine how much better this could have been if Tom Hiddleston had been cast as was initially planned. Actually, even then it would probably have just been terrible with an actor who absolutely should have known better...